A Flawed Argument for Abortion

A Flawed Argument for Abortion

One of the reasons I like to talk and argue about abortion is that so many people are so easily offended by it. I don’t mean that they are offended by any particular argument, but rather that a human being with a Y chromosome has dared to open his mouth on the subject. The indignation of hysterical phonies who substitute slogans for arguments and insults for logic is in my view a reward, a sign of accomplishment and achievement.

Someone I know recently posted a very lengthy argument for abortion as a morally acceptable choice on his blog, On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion by Mary Anne Warren.[1] In it one finds a sophisticated attempt to define “the moral community”, and explores concepts such as “genetic versus moral personhood” and “criteria for personhood”. Not surprisingly, it concludes that the unborn (or “fetuses”) are not human persons belonging to the “moral community” and consequently have no rights. Further, even if rights were extended to them, they would never outweigh those of the mother, whom no one can deny is a person.

It was rather difficult for me to identify just what moral approach was being used. On the surface it appears to be the argument that our rights are derived from our status as persons belonging to this “moral community”, that our moral obligations only extend to those whom we are able to deem, on the basis of their having met at least some of the criteria outlined, persons. The author unfortunately refers to Thomas Jefferson in the first paragraph:

“What sort of entity, exactly, has the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Jefferson attributed these rights to all men, and it may or may not be fair to suggest that he intended to attribute them only to men.”

If Jefferson is her template, and we are never really given a different one, how could it have been forgotten that he identified our Creator as the endower of those rights? Jefferson may have used the word “men”, and he may well have only meant white men. After all we know he owned slaves. So, of course, did the ancient Greeks whom the author invokes to give her slouching towards infanticide an enlightened gloss.

Nonetheless it remains that Jefferson did not identify himself as the attributer of rights, but rather, a Creator. Jefferson’s personal religious inclinations, which I understand leaned towards the fashionable Deism of the 18th century Enlightenment, are not the issue here either. In this particular belief, which I think he authentically held, he shares a common conviction with Christians – that rights only have meaning if they come from God. Indeed Jefferson is also quoted as writing:

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?" --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVIII, 1782. ME 2:227[2]

Let it not also be forgotten that Jefferson, meditating on the issue of slavery, trembled for his country when he recalled that “God is just”. These points are not at all irrelevant, since if God is invoked as the author of rights, the various criteria that Ms. Warren formulates throughout her argument become superfluous at best. While we might not be able to make an immediate leap to the pro-life position, we can nonetheless claim that the argument needs to proceed along much different lines.

Yet Warren, presumably, does not wish to bring God into it. If God is out, then Jefferson is out as well, and as you will see should you read the article, there is little left in his place. The question remains open enough to her: why should anyone meeting her criteria for personhood have the rights Jefferson claimed were “the gift of God”?

We in fact find in the article another conception of morality which I find meaningless, what I will call “consensus morality”, and alongside it, mere selfishness. The former is snuck through the backdoor of the argument when the author attempts to defend herself against the charge that her criteria for personhood could easily justify infanticide and involuntary euthanasia for a number of groups, as all such criteria inevitably ends up doing. Here is the specific passage I am referring to:

“[M]ost of us value the lives of infants, and would prefer to pay taxes to support orphanages and state institutions for the handicapped rather than to allow unwanted infants to be killed. So long as most people feel this way, and so long as our society can afford to provide care for infants which are unwanted or which have special needs that preclude home care, it is wrong to destroy any infant which has a chance of living a reasonably satisfactory life.”

I will refrain for now from commenting on the economic proviso, which I find morally repugnant. Rather I will draw attention to the language used here: “Most of us value” and “so long as most people feel this way.” This is what it ultimately can be reduced to – the principle of might makes right. If those of us who “feel” one way are in the majority, those who dissent would be “wrong” to destroy an infant (and not just any infant, but that which has a chance of living a reasonably satisfactory life, another morally repugnant standard).

Subjective feelings plus numerical strength = right. Dissent from this mass of feelings on the issue = wrong. How far Warren has traveled from Jefferson! One is compelled to ask what the significance of Warren’s criteria for establishing personhood is at all, if the question of moral truth can be settled through simply asking everyone in society to raise their hand, yea or nae? The objective argument which dominates the middle sections of the article is called into question simply by virtue of its having been objective. Consider Warren’s lead-in to her five criteria of personhood, a hypothetical situation:

“Imagine a space traveler who lands on an unknown planet and encounters a race of beings utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example, a source of food.”

In this scenario, we are presented with the space traveler, a moral agent, who needs to make a moral decision – he has to “somehow decide”. Our moral agent in this scenario is motivated solely by whether or not his actions will result in guilt. Where there is guilt we may presume a moral wrong; where there is no guilt, we may presume a moral good, or at the least a sort of morally neutral act on par with shoe-tying or singing in the shower. By this dubious criteria, in conjunction with the numerical majority criteria, if the majority of us felt guilty about the practice of abortion, it would be sufficient to outlaw it.

This is not what Warren intends us to take away from her argument. This is because her argument presumes that we will agree with her five criteria for personhood, and conclude as she does that a being that meets none of the criteria is not a person and therefore bereft of rights. But what she has demonstrated in actuality is that her moral compass is mere selfishness. Some may choose to interpret that description as a derogatory one. But how can it otherwise be described? If the space traveler would feel no guilt at using the aliens he encountered as a source of food, and/or if the majority of humans agreed with the space traveler, then it would hardly matter whether the aliens met Warren’s criteria or not. What happens to them is ultimately dependent upon how our behavior towards them makes us feel, not on what they are. This is what I believe to be the real moral significance of her argument. If it feels good, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t do it. All she has done is elevated feelings to morals. The question of whether or not the space traveler is "behaving morally" towards the being he counters is completely meaningless, because the phrase "behaving morally" is meaningless.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone by this point that I am pro-life. I am pro-life for many reasons, not the least of which is the bankruptcy of arguments such as Warren’s. I do not require a series of elaborate “scientific” justifications for my position either. The dignity and value of human life is not a testable scientific hypothesis. I agree whole-heartedly with Thomas Jefferson: rights can only come from God. Elsewhere I have argued that to assume human value is to assume the existence of a being capable of valuing all humans equally, as one does not possess moral value, but is valued.

If rights are said to rest on our feelings alone, they may as well rest upon nothing. Feelings can be swayed and changed. The historical experience of fascism has shown that the irrational can triumph over the rational, that society can be swept up in all kinds of crazes. No one believes that the Holocaust was morally acceptable on the grounds that the Nazis did not feel guilty about murdering the Jews. Such an argument is instinctively repulsive.

Of course Warren and those who share her position would retort that an adult Jew is obviously a human person, while an unborn fetus is obviously not. But then she and her supporters would have to explain why subjective feelings get to determine whether or not infanticide is “right” (she doesn’t even speak of it in legal, but in moral terms), and why the guilt of the space traveler, as opposed to the nature of the thing he might want to use as food, is the primary concern, or even a concern at all.

It also places her in the awkward position of having to accept that the Jewish babies and fetuses that perished under the Nazis were not really murdered; it would obligate historians who share her premises to revise the 6 million death count by subtracting fetuses, infants, the comatose, and whomever else is deemed a non-person from the list. The same of course would have to be done for all of the other groups that suffered under the Nazis. To leave them on the list is to recognize their status as human beings who had a right to live, who did not deserve to be murdered by sophisticated machinery intended exactly for that purpose.

If the absence of guilt and the presence of consensus make right, then Hitler did nothing wrong. Under Nazi law, he certainly did nothing illegal.

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[1] from Biomedical Ethics. 4^th ed. T.A. Mappes and D. DeGrazia, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1996, pp. 434-440.

[2] http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0100.htm